Future Movements: Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures—An Introduction

We have to be really creative and we have to find joy in each other. As much as it might be easy to think all we talk about is revolution, we also talk about joy and the type of world that we're creating, because we understand that revolution isn't just the ending of something, it's the beginning of something. Something new. Something that has a larger table that has more people at it. Something that feels more collaborative.

—Janaya "future" Khan, "staunch Afrofuturist" and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Canada (2018)

. . . white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. And so we must imagine a new country.

—Ta-Nehisi Coates (2014)

Humanists and social scientists must think of new possibilities and enter empirical and imaginary evidences into the public sphere and the public debate of our new realities.

—Rinaldo Walcott (2016)

Black Futurism should be observant about race and power relations in this historical moment.

—Greg Tate (2016)

This issue arises at the crossroads, out of a vertiginous moment of bearing witness, through uneven means, and through entirely different subject positions, to the normalization of horrific events of antiblackness, particularly black deaths at the hands of police, that have come to characterize not just symptomatic and structural racism in the 21st century, but deteriorating conditions of the neoliberal political imaginary, and its socioeconomic order, that affect marginalized and racialized peoples worldwide.¹

At the same time, the impulse for this issue began as a series of conversations that criss-crossed boundaries of race, culture and nationality between this issue's two editors—one white Canadian scholar from the West Coast, one African American professor in St. Louis—on the political and creative futures of "Afrofuturism." We suspend Afrofuturism in quotation marks, as the term has acquired different meanings, resonances and valences as it transforms itself through the diverse cultural contexts of the Afrodiaspora (a point we will explore below). Howsoever it is named, we recognize that black speculative futurity responds to a need to imagine "something new," as Janaya Khan emphasizes—an Afrofuturity wrought in the "new countries" of Coates and "imaginary evidences" of Walcott that rethinks not only what "black to the future" looks like, as a worlding, a politics, or culture, but how it attends to the speculative means of its arrival, as it searches for justice, reconciliation, and healing with the past. At the same time, we heed Tate's warning that black futurism needs to "remain observant about race and power relations in this historical moment," which is why this issue looks to the field of the political as it intersects black speculative futurity. We see in the history, expressions and force of Afrofuturism something of a counter-power to prevailing conditions, socioeconomic and ideological, of white supremacy—or rather the anxiety, reactionary violence and fear borne of its fragility.

These conditions, while acknowledging processes of redress and reconciliation to colonialism and slavery in some (though relatively few) nation-states—processes that for the most part remain discursive apologia and not (yet) meaningful attempts at reparation or socioeconomic autonomy²—reflect the general bankruptcy of the neoliberal imaginary. This is not to say that the ever-deepening insolvency of the neoliberal fantasy represents a weakening of its power (see Haiven 2014). We live in a world whose dreams of Babylon remain beholden to petro-capitalism and its refusals to meaningfully address climate change, where elite technology trickles up, where there are few alternatives to the marked rise in racialized and gendered inequality stemming from historical and structural conditions of oppression, including slavery, colonialism and—to use a phrase from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission—"cultural genocide."³ Following a long history of white fears of contagion, miscegenation, and revenge of the other that were elaborated so powerfully by Fanon (2004), the neoliberal imaginary has entrenched itself in the paranoia of the post-9/11 surveillance...